On
January 15, 2009 we received a reprieve from Obamamania and our focus on what
was forming into one of the most inept presidential administrations when
Captain Chesley Sullenberger ditched US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson
River in the media capital of the world. It was said that it came during a
time when we needed our faith in the competence of our fellow man restored
and it was a surprise turn for a pilot who was probably trying to end his
career without bending any aluminum and hoping that his chief pilot would
say: “Who was that guy?” when he
saw his name on the retirement list.

Nevertheless,
he was forced into fame.

Driving
home from the airport that evening, I was listening to the neo-con Michael Savage
praise this man on the radio; touting his awesome skill and how when the host
boards an airliner (when he’s not flying private jets) he wants to be able to
turn left and see someone with grey hair, blue eyes and military experience sitting up front. Did he not know that the
application military technique to an Airbus 300 led the first officer of
American 587 to overcontrol that plane with aggressive rudder inputs which
sheared the vertical fin from the fuselage and sent the plane plummeting into
a Queens neighborhood? We were led to believe that his experience flying the
antiquated F-4 Phantom thirty years ago (which incidentally has an ejection
seat for such events) was more important than his years of flying the line
and training on high tech airliners or even the fact that he is a glider
instructor.

Later,
Clay Lacy joined the show ostensibly to corroborate Savage’s babbling take on
the event but he did little but use the opportunity to say that the corporate
jets in his fleet might fair better. He admitted having military experience
himself, but this was deceptive because he was not an Academy graduate like
Sullenberger nor had he flown much in the service. With 50,000 hours of
flying he is ranked second to Evelyn Johnson in terms of time spent in the
air. His brief guard stint began after he
started his 40 year career with United Airlines and was done to avoid the
infantry. Despite being a scab, his career as an airline pilot was lucrative
enough to earn him the seed money for his own charter and aerial
cinematography company. While he’s done a good job of ensuring that his own
employees never experience the kind of career he did, if you’ve seen a
Hollywood movie made within the last four decades with aerial footage, the
chances are great that Clay Lacy Aviation had a hand in it. Check the
credits.

The
coverage of Sullenberger’s water landing was non stop. Like the “bubbleheaded
bleach-blonde,” Don Henley describes in his song “Dirty Laundry,” who “comes
on at 5:00” and “can tell you about the plane crash with a gleam in her eye,”
Fox News’ boisterous attorney-turned-anchor Megyn Kelly read the cockpit
transcript and did her best captain’s impersonation with the words “I have
control” amidst giggles she could barely contain. It was enough to send any
transport pilot on a search for the nearest airsickness bag.

It
has been called: The Miracle on the Hudson, but how does this miracle, where
no one even got wet, rank?

On
July 19, 1989, United flight 232 suffered an un-contained failure in the
center engine which severed all the hydraulic lines with hurling shrapnel. It
should have been over for everyone aboard at 37,000 feet when this happened
because the crew lost all power to the flight controls. A priest could have
given conditional absolution to all if one had been on board, yet the crew,
led by Capt. Al Haynes, was too busy to be scared. While they were unable to roll, yaw or pitch the aircraft, they made
judicious use of the two remaining engines to steer the plane with
differential power. They used every asset available to them including
the help of a jumpseating off duty pilot (Jumpseating
is a professional privilege whereby pilots can fly free on carriers for
personal reasons) who helped manipulate the throttles and lower the landing
gear for the over-tasked crew. In spite of this, Haynes kept his composure
and his sense of humor.

Jumpseater: I'll tell you what, we'll have a beer when this is all done.

Haynes: Well
I don't drink, but I'll sure as hell have one.

Sioux City Approach: United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, the wind's currently three six zero at
one one; (360 degrees/11kts). You're cleared to land on any runway.

Haynes: [laughter]
Roger. [laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?
(Haynes was alluding to the extreme difficulty in controlling the aircraft
and their slim chances of making it to the airport at all).

While the landing had to be termed a crash,
nearly two-thirds of the occupants survived the fireball. The NTSB concluded
after studying the event, that training for such a scenario would involve too
many factors to be practical and was unable to reproduce such an outcome in
simulators.

In
August of 2006, a Hawker business jet collided with a glider at 16,000 feet.
It takes a long time searching the internet to get the facts of this story
but reports say that the Japanese glider pilot turned off his altitude
encoding transponder (to save the battery) thereby making it invisible to the
jet’s Traffic Collision Avoidance System. The glider pilot bailed out prior
to impact and the jet suffered damage to the wings and tail with a
concomitant loss of directional control as air rushed into the front of the
plane with tremendous velocity and noise. One engine was gone and the plane
was forced to make a wheels up landing at an abandoned airfield.
Nevertheless, the passengers claimed it wasn’t particularly rough.

The
sailplane’s carbon fibre spar cut through the nose of the jet and entered the
cockpit pinning the controls in the captain’s lap. Any further and she would
have been bisected at the abdomen. The sheriff reported
that the cockpit looked like a hand grenade went off inside. All survived. It
was truly a miracle.

Where
was the adulation for this skilled aviatrix and her first officer? From
Amelia Earhart to Kara Hultgreen, political pressure has pushed female pilots
beyond where their abilities would warrant while the Patty Wagstaffs and
Hanna Reitsches are only known to aviation buffs. In the case of Reitsch, the
fact that she was a devoted Nazi assures forever that she will never be
recognized as one of history’s best pilots.

Applause
for landings is appreciated in this beleaguered profession but it sometimes
underscores the frustrating fact that few appreciate all that goes into
making the rest of one’s flight so forgettable.

Indubitably,
all pilots perform more difficult feats than what amounted to a VMC ditching
without the swells of the open sea and with all the visual cues of a large
runway complete with crash & fire rescue. Phil Comstock and his Wilson
Group have been surveying unionized pilots for decades and he often has to
remind them how special they are as a labor group. By way of comparison, consider
a surgeon about to perform a very serious operation. Does he have a federal
license? Must he go for a medical exam himself every six months? Is he drug
tested and how much of his background is a matter of public record? Does the
retention of his right to practice medicine depend upon him going into the
operating room and performing “simulated surgery” during which an explosion
occurs, the patient wakes up from anesthesia and the room goes dark with a
generator failure. All the while he is told he must perform as though
everything is normal.

Pilots
are submitted to this type of scrutiny twice a year; it’s just called
training and checking. For many it brings on more anxiety than most
emergencies they’ll every experience. So much so that regional pilots, who often
lack union protection to guard against the capriciousness of some examiners,
wryly refer to it as “career day.” And nearly all of these simulated
emergencies are conducted under Instrument
Meteorological Conditions as opposed to Visual
Meteorological Conditions. The distinction is lost on most non aviators who
can only correlate flying to driving a car in a two dimensional environment.
Without instrument training and proficiency the absolute best pilot is
helplessly in a vertigo situation seconds after losing sight of the horizon.
The inner ear balance mechanism will not prevent a death spiral from ensuing.
As a private pilot, William F. Buckley Jr. inadvertently found himself in an
overcast layer and said
many times: “I have never experienced
such a thing, and the sensation was terrifying, robbing you, in an instant,
of all of the normal coordinates of normal life, including any sense of what
is up and what is down.”If he hadn’t had a
seasoned pilot with him, the conservative movement may have been stillborn.
The instrument rated John F. Kennedy, Jr was not so fortunate as he followed
the pattern of many doctors and lawyers affluent enough to become pilots and
own planes but with little time to practice and remain proficient. With his
wife and sister-in-law on board, he pressed on to Hyannis as the horizon
disappeared into the haze and darkness over Long Island Sound.

Perhaps
what frightened Sullenberger the most was the notion that the decisions he
would make in seconds would be analyzed for months. The findings made by the
FAA give some insight into how he would’ve been treated if there had been a
less than happy ending. As the Wall
Street Jounal reported:

1)In hindsight, the crew incorrectly
pitched the nose of the aircraft down to gain the airspeed necessary to
relight the engines thereby losing precious altitude and limiting their
options.

2)While ditching was the safest and
easiest thing to do with the surest outcome, the event was replayed by
airlines and manufacturers in simulators and all test pilots were able to
return to LaGuardia for a safe landing.

3)Checklist procedures (though poorly
designed) were not properly completed and the pressurization outflow valves
remained open thus bringing water into the fuselage.

4)It was absurdly suggested that the crew committed one of the
most common violations of federal air regulations: They broke sterile
cockpit, the rule that proscribes having conversations not pertinent to the
safe operation of an aircraft below ten thousand feet. This rule would be
cited a month later when the transcript of Colgan flight 3407 showed the crew
was talking about fatigue, low pay and long commutes to work without adequate
rest before that plane crashed.

5)Even advocates for the manufacturer
tried to diminish the accomplishment by pointing out
how an Airbus, designed with a European socialist mentality takes the pilot
out of the equation, not only prevents a “dumb pilot” from stalling or
over-speeding an aircraft but, in this situation, ensured that they had
hydraulic power and instrumentation despite the loss of engine driven pumps
and generators.

So
why is Sullenberger, who never put himself on a pedestal higher than others,
a hero to so many airline pilots? Simply put, it’s because he has used his
fame to draw attention to the plight of his profession. When the Republican
airline pilot appeared before Congress he said: “Flying has been my lifelong passion, but while I love my profession,
I do not like what has happened to it. My decision to remain in the
profession I love has come at tremendous cost to me and my family. My pay was
cut by 40 percent and my contractual entitlement to a retirement pension was
stripped away ... Airline pilots do not live in a vacuum, and we understand
fully and are sympathetic to the fact that many Americans have recently
experienced economic difficulties. But, airline employees have been hit by an
economic tsunami ... I attempt to speak accurately and plainly, so please do
not think I exaggerate when I say that I do not know a single professional
airline pilot who wants his or her children to follow in their footsteps.”

As
someone with aviation pursuits outside of his career, it’s a fair guess that
he is a member of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, an organization
whose relationship to pilots is analogous with the one between the NRA and
gun owners. Perhaps, he read the June 2006 AOPA Pilot article “The Glory Days
Are Over” written with great anguish by Capt. Barry Schiff. The 73-year-old
Schiff spent three decades at TWA flying everything in their fleet; and has
managed to get checked out in over 300 different aircraft types for
recreation. He described his post-World-War-II career as one characterized by
rising pay and improved working conditions with each contract renewal, but in
retrospect.

That
era came to an end in 1978 when President Jimmy Carter’s deregulated of the
airline industry. When Schiff’s son Brian was hired as a pilot in 1989, the
future looked bleak because, as a result of deregulation and all the changes
which followed, he would surely work harder and for less pay than his dad.
Things went from bad to worse for this young 727 captain when TWA merged with
American Airlines. In two years he went from the left seat to the right seat
to the street. He now flies a regional jet for the American subsidiary
American Eagle. Schiff’s other son Paul bounced around at regional airlines
for over six years but never made as much as $30,000 a year, and the little
that he did earn was quickly eaten up in the expenses associated with working
21 days a month away from home. Paul Schiff had no social life and no hope of
settling down because, even if he had the time to meet someone, he couldn’t
afford to date with an empty wallet. After much agonizing, he left the
profession and opened up a pet
supply company.

While
Schiff Senior concludes that he cannot recommend the pilot profession any
longer, he conceded that “Coping with the challenges of weather, communing
with nature in a way only pilots can appreciate, and maneuvering a
sophisticated aircraft from one place on Earth to another remains a
stimulating and gratifying endeavor. It is the price one must pay to get
there that is so discouraging.”

This
love of flying is what makes this career unique, and it is this love which
makes flying part of their identity as pilots. Most can look back to their
youth and recall always looking up at planes that flew overhead and drawing
doodles of aircraft in class when they should have been paying attention to
the teacher. Can an attorney say that he dreamt of trying cases when he was
in grammar school? This infatuation explains the pilot’s willingness to work
in horrid conditionsbut it also
explains the sacrifices of time and money which people are willing to incur
to become an airline pilot; it also explains how the airlines can use this
infatuation to drive down wages. Only within a minority of pilots trained at
the expense of the military can there be found individuals for whom flying is
just a job; second to being an officer. Many aircraft manufacturers wrongly
assumed after WWII that the returning pilots would want to own their own
light aircraft. Acting on this erroneous assumption, the aircraft builders
produced such a glut of personal planes, which went unsold, that most went
out of business. After a while, planes like Buckley’s Ercoupe could be
purchased by college students. The fact that both president Bushes and John
McCain never touched the controls of an aircraft again after leaving the
military isn’t any more exceptional today than it was then.

Unlike
other first world countries, the U.S. has usually been able to rely on a
pipeline of pilots from the military, particularly when airline opportunities
were too few for one to justify the training investment themselves.
Recognizing that military flying entails its own set of skills, a set of
skills not completely congruent with the skills needed to fly commercial
planes, legacy carriers such as All Nippon Airlines, Japan Air, Lufthansa,
AlItalia and many others eschewed pilots trained in the military and preferred
to rely on ab-initio programs to
train their pilots themselves. This usually means that the theoretical
training is accomplished in the home country and practical training is done
in the U.S.A. where the cost of flying is less than prohibitive due in part
to an abundance of low paid American flight instructors trying to build
flight time in the hopes of breaking into airline flying themselves. Closely
monitored along the way, these pilots have been safely placed in the cockpits
of jetliners with less experience than most pilots hired stateside through
affirmative action quotas.

The
‘60s saw the only true pilot shortage in the United States. It was short
lived, but it forced airlines to train their own pilots. From this group
emerged men like future MEC chairmen Rick Dubinsky and Roger Hall two of the
fiercest champions of unionized pilots ever seen on the property of United
Airlines. [FTL2]

U.S.
commercial aviation’s love affair with the military is, however, about more
than just avoiding the costs of training pilots. While it’s true that one can
hardly distinguish the background of a pilot after a few years with an
airline, as new hires, military pilots are often the least militant of labor
groups. Until the end of the first contract negotiation they experience,
their peers will often view them as Kool-Aide drinkers easily swayed by
managerial agitprop.

The
year 1919 saw the first attempts to unionize Air Mail pilots. When the Post
Office forced its pilots to fly in the weather element they feared the most,
namely, fog, the pilots went on strike, and military pilots, who were more
compliant than their union-affiliated colleagues, were brought in to break
the strike. The results, for those unfamiliar with instrument flying, were
disastrous. The loss of personnel and aircraft that came about as a result of
the government’s attempt to use docile military pilots to break the first
strike resulted in a recognition of the authority of a pilot to determine
when to fly and when not to and the equipping of the early mail planes with
primitive weather instruments.

When
the pilots of Century Airlines struck in 1932, Army and Navy pilots were
released from active duty to take their places, and the Department of
Commerce sent a special team to certify the new hires. Attempts by the
nascent Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) to make their case to the new
hires along with job promises for the strikebreakers fell on deaf ears and
were further thwarted by the airline, which forced the new hires to live in a
guarded dormitory, take their meals together, and ride to and from the
airfield on a guarded bus. [FTL1]

In
1946, TWA was struck, and this time the pilots were threatened with
replacement by an organization called the Military Pilots Association (MPA),
a group of pilots flush with recent four engine experience and boasting
13,000 members, who had allegedly flown in the Air Transport Command. So
brazen was this group that they took to calling pilots exempted from military
duty because they were involved in essential service “draft dodgers” and they
insisted upon receiving seniority rights over those already on the property
if called upon to break the strike.

And
this brings us to Ronald Reagan and the PATCO strike of 1981. According
to Alan Greenspan, “Perhaps the most important, and then highly
controversial, domestic initiative was the firing of the air traffic
controllers in August 1981. The President invoked the law that striking
government employees forfeit their jobs, an action that unsettled those who
cynically believed no President would ever uphold that law. President Reagan
prevailed, as you know, but far more importantly his action gave weight to
the legal right of private employers,
previously not fully exercised, to use their own discretion to both hire and
discharge workers.”

It
seems the distinction between public employees and private employees makes it
illegal for the former to strike but Greenspan thinks the termination
emboldened private employers to respond similarly. In the years following
Reagan’s successful attempt to break the strike, we were forced to endure an
inadequate ATC system reminiscent of the third world, and it was the military
that provided the replacements, even if in time the replacements would form
NATCA and start to resemble the group they replaced.

The transformation of the
professional pilot from a goggled occupant of an open cockpit into an
aristocrat of labor whose work actions would be derided as "Cadillac
Strikes" in the press did not happen accidentally nor was it the work of
the Invisible Hand of the market. From the earliest days of ALPA under the
tutelage of Captain Dave Behncke, pilots, who are by nature very individualistic,
were cobbled together into a working, viable guild with self respect.
Benefitting from a prescience that sometimes even eluded the airline builders
of the past, such as the legendary Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern or Juan
Trippe of Pan American, Behncke devised pay scales that were tied to aircraft
size and speed. While management may not have been able to look forward to
days when airliners where bigger and faster than the DC-3, Behncke could.
When technology allowed these planes to come on line, pilot pay went up
automatically just as surely as profits; much to the chagrin of management. An early assault on pilot wages came
in the form of the so-called Age 60 rule. Several airlines had tried and
failed to impose mandatory retirement ages on their pilots outside of
negotiations as the larger and faster aircraft were being delivered. The
pioneer era pilots were approaching 60, and there was a concern that their
longevity coupled to higher pay rates would cut into profits as would the
longer times anticipated for training them. After the Korean War, airlines
were flooded with applications from pilots who had jet experience and would
work for less. No data ever gathered was able to prove that older pilots were
less safe than younger pilots, but the law was rammed through because
American Airlines president and founder C.R. Smith’s friend former Army Air
Corps Lt. Gen. Elwood “Pete” Quesada had recently been named the first
administrator of the newly created FAA by his former military commander,
President Dwight D. Eisenhower. For more information on how this fraud was
perpetrated go to: http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/483/or http://www.age60rule.com/history_frameset.html.

As an interesting side
note, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, former president of Notre Dame University, was a
proponent of mandatory early retirement and wrote letter to the administrator
who, in a rare moment of candor, admitted that
there was no medical evidence to support his decision. After passage of the
mandatory retirement bill, the forcibly retired pilot could then be employed
at a commuter airline and work in that more physiologically demanding
environment but the compensation was significantly less.

Even
after saddling themselves with multiple alimony payments, older pilots remain
incapable of seeing how their grief resulted from living a lie as the poster
boys for the Sexual Revolution. The envy of arab shiekhs with a more modest
harems, these well-healed and fit flyboys enjoyed a desirable ratio with
attractive, young unmarried women who ran around in the back of the plane.
The younger generation is now convinced it missed out on something good by
being born too late. The Playboy-Pilot era is best exemplified in by the
movie The Pilot starring Cliff
Robertson, a film which, according
to one pilot blogger“has realistic DC8
flying/checklists (Cliff Robertson got typed for the film). It has booze
(lots), a mistress on the opposite coast (he bids transcons for this reason),
great late ‘70s cut uniforms/hairstyles with stewardesses' skirts high cut
enough to exonerate all of us for choosing this NOW shit profession.”

As
a member of what is already the most psychologically analyzed profession what
does this pilot-blogger think of all the gay men who have now squeezed those
young girls out of the profession and the sensitivity training he must now
submit to? It’s doubtful that he perceives it as just the next phase in the
use of sexual liberation as a means of control.

How,
you ask, does business benefit from this distraction? Consider the fact that
airlines were among the first to make contraceptives part of their benefits
packages. While it makes business sense for an airline to open up a crew base
in some far flung place, isn’t it easier to order the relocation of a
deracinated pilot with a broken or non-existent marriage and no kids? And if
that makes sense in terms of driving down wages and increasing control, then
wouldn’t the ideal employee then be a military trained homosexual?

It is true that the flight
deck had been, with few exceptions, the preserve of the white male. Relying
on the military pipeline would almost assure that. Prior to the ‘60s I don’t
think people gave it much thought since they probably didn’t identify themselves
in those terms but rather along regional or ethnic lines. But the fact
remains: the two biggest groups making up the pilot population were southern
whites and ethnic Catholics. It would take affirmative action to unite them
in an ugly way, so that now you can ask any “white” airline pilot what UNITED
stands for and he’ll come back with: Unqualified Niggers in Training, Expect
Delays.” Of course, their reclassification as “whites” was abetted by the
flight to the suburbs made easier by the fact that they seldom commuted daily
to work and almost never at rush hour.

Ethnic Catholics have
traditionally been over represented in the transportation industry and had
growing political clout. Combined with the baby boom, the fact that their
presence in the military was out of proportion to the general population
assured the growth of this group in the pilot profession. I contend that they
could have more easily assimilated Hispanics and blacks naturally. Instead
they were forced to accept that they along with other “whites” had a debt to
pay for past injustices beyond their control.

The surge in members of
the fairer sex on the flight deck was first brought about by the courts but
later eagerly promoted by the human resource departments. Books can be written
on the short term costs to airlines of these policies, and stories of
incompetence abound whenever pilots gather, but most were and still are quite
capable of performing their job.

Large airlines have
already demonstrated that they have, due to the long upgrade times, the
capacity to hire and train pilots with very little experience such as the
tactical military pilot who typically flies one-tenth as much in a year as a
regional pilot. Unlike police departments and firehouses that went through similar
social engineering experiences, women never put any one in this field in
danger because of their lack of upper-body strength. As senior captains
internalized the commands of their oppressors, they became intimidated by the
possibility of being charged with sexual harassment. Comics have averred that
it is now possible for a flight attendant to get a pilot pregnant, but
perhaps the larger social consequence of sexual favoritism has been that it
is easier for a daughter to follow in her father’s footsteps than a son. All
of these things had the effect of weakening the cohesiveness of the pilot
group and decreasing the value of its labor through an increase in the size
of the workforce.

The period following
deregulation saw the smashing of unions by corporate raiders such as Frank
Lorenzo and the establishment of non-union “alter ego” companies that took
business away from unionized carriers with the same owners. Like the thugs
who steal cars, Lorenzo found that airlines were sometimes worth more for
their parts than as a whole.

Exacerbating the divisive
effect which cheaper labor working at nonunion airlines had on the industry,
the individualistic traits of pilots allowed management to play groups off
against one another. In 1982, two-tiered pay scales were devised
"to protect the pay of senior pilots" when in fact they were
intended to give unequal pay for equal work and prevent new hires under the
infamous "B-scale" from ever seeing compensations rates like their
colleagues on a different track. The deviousness of the “B-scale” was that it
played to myopia and greed of the pilots who voted for it by pitting pilots
currently working against those who weren’t even hired. [FTL2]

Some pilot groups were
sold the notion that pay scales should be governed by longevity and not by
equipment flown. Companies would save money on cross training crews to
different fleets and pilots could stay in their preferred aircraft and forego
jeopardizing their careers by not having to be trained and checked on new
aircraft types every few years in order to get a raise. Such pyramidal pay
structures, while initially appealing to junior pilots who can't see
themselves ever having the seniority to bid the largest equipment, never give
the best pay to all crews. In fact, with a carrot at the apogee, they only
induce pilots at the bottom to perform the same tasks for less in
anticipation of a move, with time, to the top. When the pyramid gets too top
heavy, management cries for concessions.

Then came the Regionals.

Whether an individual Regional
Airline existed in some form before the 1980s is irrelevant because even most
major airlines in the early years would be characterized by regional
activities by the standards of today’s modern intercontinental jets. When I
used the term “regional” I’m referring to the subcontractors which are not
really airlines in the classical sense. Unlike the airlines which share their
paint schemes, regionals are not able to increase market share through
advertising, adding routes and destinations, increasing the number of fights
or tweaking fares. So-called regional airlines agree to carry the passengers
of a mainline carrier for a set price, and the only way they are able to
increase their profit margins is through the streamlining of the operation.
Sometimes this comes from operating newer more efficient aircraft, but in the
end it usually comes about through cutting the costs of salaries, training
and maintenance. There is intense competition between regional airlines for
these contracts, and their options are that limited.

Major airlines have now
shifted so much of their flying over to regional partners that we are now in
a situation where regionals make up the backbone of the domestic route
structure. The pilots of major airlines were only been able to slow this
process through what are known in the industry as “Scope agreements.” Pilot
contracts attempted to limit the flying performed by regional partners by
restricting the capacity and range of regional aircraft. The efforts to stop
the chipping away of these constraints have been in vain. In 1997, the pilots
of American Airlines struck to prevent American Eagle from acquiring regional
jets, but then-President Bill Clinton ordered them back to work after 30
minutes. When they engaged in a sick out in 1999 over the farming out of
flights to Reno Air, the union representing the American pilots was nearly
fined out of existence. After calling them cry babies and comparing the
pilots to the Mafia, Judge Joe Kendall declared: "If the activity and
consequent damages continue, when all the dust clears, all the assets of the
union, including their strike war chest, will be capable of being safely
stored in the overhead bin of a Piper Cub." Kendall was even bold enough
to trot out the old canard that because pilots are limited to 100 hours of
flying per month, they were part-time employees, when their actual duty times
frequently doubles this figure and includes time they are not compensated
for.

Federal law may require
the name of the regional airline operating your flight to be listed on the
ticket and somewhere along the outside of the plane, but as far as airline
executives are concerned, they’d prefer you to assume you were flying on the
mainline carrier, unless there’s is a crash, at which point the liability assumed
by the contracting regional kicks in. Unfortunately, it has taken the deadly
crashes of some regional aircraft to highlight the abysmal working conditions
at regional airlines.

Low pay, long hours, debt,
and despair typify the life of a regional airline pilot today. Michael
Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story
probably introduced many people to this fact. He interviewed pilots who
collected food stamps and were reprimanded for getting sick. He asked how a
pilot who makes less than $20,000 per year can expect to pay off $100,000 in
loans taken out to qualify for the job. For safety’s sake, the FAA limits the
amount of hours a pilot can fly and be on duty, but it doesn’t prevent a
pilot from holding a second job and showing up to work tired. Moore revealed
that pilots waited tables, walked dogs and donated blood on their days “off.”
It was refreshing to see that someone was bold enough to divulge this dirty
secret on the silver screen.

Perhaps
he didn’t want to push the bounds of credulity, but Moore missed entirely the
other half of the story, which is that some of these pilots are in essence
paying to ride up front. Given that regional pilots (flying planes that are
starting to even look like what the majors are flying) are able to transition
seamlessly to the mainlines, management at the regionals has devised training
contracts and pay for training programs to curb attrition rates. Paying a
living wage would defeat the purpose of regionals. By far the most egregious
offender in this area is Gulfstream International which has expanded the idea
to create another revenue stream.

During
the Eastern Airlines strike of the late ‘80, Capt. Thomas L. Cooper, a strike
breaker who proudly had “#1 Scab” emblazoned on his flight bag, founded a
small on-demand air taxi which flew to Haiti and the Bahamas from South
Florida. The company initially operated eight passenger piston powered Cessna
402s. Through a third party company named Avtar International, they did their
pilot recruiting at job fairs and with ads placed in Flying magazine and glossy career oriented publications like Career Pilot and Piloting Careers. As the old ads in Flying show, for $8,900, a pilot could get 150 hours of real
world multi engine experience as a first officer in an airline environment,
all legally loggable toward the ATP. A military pilot or a flight instructor
with the requisite 1,500 hours of total time for the Airline Transport rating
(ATP) could attend a weekend course
at ATP, Inc., where the test prep would put the SAT courses to shame.
Through feedback, they had managed to whittle the test down to 200 potential
questions, and the applicant would spend a few hours looking at answers on
one of their proprietary PCs and then when he was confident enough, move to
another computer and take the actual test. A test that would normally take
hours could now be aced without reading the questions or pulling out the
pilot’s slide rule or maps. The practical test in the airplane was similarly
slipshod. Yet, after completing this program, such a pilot, provided he had
an additional $15,000, could be a captain at Gulfstream International, though
it’s doubtful with such limited experience himself whether he could provide
any useful mentorship to his first officers.

Ideally,
the first officer would complete his time and then be replaced by someone
else with “a check book and a dream.” Not being in the military environment
or in a European style ab-initio program,
low time civilian pilots are faced with the old conundrum: how do you get a
job without experience; how do you get experience without a job? At a stage
in their career where flight time is more valuable to them than fair wages,
paying less than it would cost them to rent the plane is an attractive proposition.

The
program came with good news and bad news, neither of which was advertised.
Because the program relied heavily on foreign nationals who could secure low
interest educational loans but had difficulty obtaining the appropriate
visas, U.S. pilots often had the chance to fly more hours than they purchased
because this source of pilots was unreliable when the immigration laws were
sporadically enforced with some vigor resulting in the deportation of pilots.

The
bad news was, that these first officers, technically, weren’t required crew
members and if passengers loads or other weight limitations dictated, they
could be bumped from the flight. Hopefully, this would only happen stateside
when it was easier to hitch a ride home.

Such
conditioning quickly transformed the interning pilot into a groveling
sycophant willing to sell out his peers and curry favor with management and
the captains with whom he shared a room on layovers for the chance to work more without pay and ultimately log enough
time to qualify to buy a paid position in the left seat.

As
the airline grew, it transitioned to an all-turbine fleet which required two
pilots, but it retained the pay-to-fly programs even when the airline evolved
into a true regional replete with code sharing agreements and new paint
schemes modeled after the airlines it served. Program costs increased with
the size of the planes flown, for time spent in larger planes is worth more
on one’s resume and topped out at $39,000 for 500 hours in the heaviest
turbo-props. At one time, even Red Chinese were sponsored to fly there by
their home country.

In
1995, in response to derision from the pilot community and the need for at
least a core of co-pilots who were dependable, U.S. citizens were remunerated
at a rate of $8 per “segment hour” or less then $10,000 a year. It was a
reluctant move by management but was easily offset by increasing the cost of
tuition. Nothing changed for the foreigners except that now their badges were
stamped in red “Jumpseat Not Authorized.” The last thing the company wanted
was someone riding in the cockpit of a major airline (particularly one they
were code-sharing with) describing the program in broken English, because by
now they were being compared to prostitutes.

It’s
baffling to non pilots why a professional would submit himself to indentured
servitude but such a path was, if all went well, the fastest route to the
flight deck of a major airline short of a sex change, and the Gulfstream
Training Academy literature has the data to support this claim.

Major
airline pilots who were eager to have their kids follow them into the cockpit
would solicit these pilots for information on the program’s ability to fast
track one’s career and were undeterred by the fact that they were sending
their sons to work for a bottom feeder that should’ve changed its call sign
from “Gulf-flight” to “Catfish” a long time ago.

Next
to Michael Moore’s movie, the second best description of life as a regional
airline pilot can be seen in the PBS Frontline documentary “Flying
Cheap”.

The
program did a fair job of depicting the long hours and low pay endured by
those who fly passengers who are convinced they are flying on the planes of a
different company. The underground market of crash pads where 10 pilots share
an apartment intended for 2 people was fairly depicted. No consideration was
given to the increasing complexity of aircraft being flown at the regional
level, but the major shortcoming of the program was the inchoate manner in
which it elucidated the relationship between mainline pilots and regional
pilots. It correctly explained that there was no mentoring or even any actual
contact between the two when they are performing their jobs. While it
correctly stated that regional airline pilots were able to upgrade to captain
much more quickly than major airline pilots, the attractiveness of this is
not the higher pay but the fact that it enables such a pilot to log valuable
pilot in command (PIC) time making him more attractive to the recruiters at
major airlines although probably not the major airline he’s currently serving
as a regional pilot because airlines prefer to raid a competitor’s cheap
labor supply rather than their own. Logging valuable flight time quickly is
why pilots often seek out employment at the least reputable airlines. Recall that Gulfstream even hired
pilots straight into the captain’s seat.

Although
“Flying Cheap” seemed more like a serious documentary than Moore’s box office
flick, it did stoop to histrionics in the production department. Most glaring
was the way in which they inserted audio of piston engines over the turbine
whine of the Bombardier Dash 8. Such melodrama plays to the ignorance of
people who don’t understand that short range, low altitude aircraft are more
efficient with external propellers even if they don’t really sound like
DC-3s.

Nevertheless,
they could’ve used this track to dub over the expert testimony of the former
DOT Inspector General Mary Schiavo. You can always count on “Scary Mary” to
show up whenever an airliner crashes, but her presence seems to prove that
industry and government will tolerate criticism as long as it’s easily
refuted and the source has been discredited. Her best seller Flying Blind, Flying Safe contained so
many factual errors, such as a completely erroneous description of how
pressurization works, that the real experts were distracted by offering
corrections to these errors and away from fixing what’s truly wrong with the
industry. In 1999, she correctly surmised that airport security was weak and
tried to make her case by checking a fake bomb (a bag with shoes and
telephone cables) onto an airliner in Ohio and then deliberately not boarding
the plane. The scheme blew up in her face when “the bomb” was immediately
detected and resulted in the shutting down of the airport until she came
forward and confessed to cameras while trying to invoke journalistic
immunity. This woman has blown nearly every opportunity that crashes offer to
reform the industry.

Nevertheless,
if you go to the PBS website, the text
of the entire interview can been seen. The fact that it was axed from the
final cut that aired on TV is proof of the saying that even a blind sow can
find a truffle.

FRONTLINE: So why doesn't free enterprise,
the capitalist system, work in this industry?

Schiavo: Because safety is like a rubber
band. It doesn't work because you can stretch it. Planes -- a lot of them are
just great. They're overbuilt. The big, old, tough Boeings were forgiving.
You can stretch safety, and sometimes you don't get caught. Why? Because you
can skate on by.

And
bad operators can skate. Good operators often aren't rewarded for their good
efforts on safety. And even when something does go wrong, they're not held
accountable because the insurers step in. They take care of the issue. The
bad actors are free to go forward and fly again. If you wanted any evidence
of that, it's the secretary of transportation standing on the Everglades, on
the backs of the downed ValuJet plane.

And
there really is no accountability that you expect from a true free-enterprise
system, and that is that the bad are allowed to fail. That's part and parcel
of the free-enterprise system. But in aviation, the bad don't fail. The bad
go to bankruptcy court, come out washed. Every seven years, it's like a
pilgrimage. They go through the bankruptcy court. The bankruptcy trustee
wipes out the debt, often wipes out what's owed to hardworking pilots and
flight attendants and everybody else.

And
this is an industry that simply does not work. It does not operate in the
free-enterprise system. So why do we pretend that it does? It doesn't. It
operates in this gray area. It's partially regulated. The government pays for
a huge hunk of it. The government now pays for security. The Aviation Trust
Fund pays for air traffic control, and the runways and the airports -- you
can't even get an airport anymore without -- I mean, we get a new airport in
this country, what, every decade or so? And then you have to float the bonds,
and it's run by a regional airport authority. That's not free enterprise!

So
there's really nothing in this system that is free enterprise -- except the
red ink.

Then
just when it sounds as if she’s on to something, Schiavo up and calls a state
of the art aircraft a “puddle jumper.”

The
seniority system gets blamed for protecting bad pilots, but it also takes away
bargaining leverage even during times of shortage because it requires that
they start over at the bottom even if it is at a better airline. They are
married to the company and dependent upon its success for their careers more
than any other employees.

It
is for this reason that ALPA can take credit for many of the advances in
safety such as improvements in navigation, equipment that helps avoid midair
collisions and Controlled Flight into Terrain (CFIT) and work rules that take
into account things like the body’s circadian rhythms and thus prevent
schedulers from treating pilots like cogs in a machine. They have even
instituted immunity guaranteeing self-disclosure programs that help to
prevent accidents by providing researchers with data they would likely never
see because so many slip-ups are never caught by the regulators. As the ones
who typically arrive at the scene of an accident before anyone else, pilots
had a vested interest in using their clout to force these improvements into
law long before CEOs, lawyers, passengers, law makers and bean counters ever
recognized the benefit. Through the years, ALPA’s motto has been: Schedule
with Safety.

The
crashes of regional airliners have thus far been unable to bring about any
significant improvement. The recent crash of Colgan 3407 is prompting
legislators to require regional airline pilots to have 1,500 of flight time
before flying for an airline, but no consideration is given to the quality of
the experience. Such a rule might harm schemes like the one at Gulfstream
International, which has had no fatal accidents, but it would not have
affected the Colgan 3407 flight, where the crew exceeded those
qualifications. Training also escapes scrutiny, and no one is asking why the
crew responded to a stall resulting from a decay in airspeed on approach and
performed a recovery technique suited to a tail-plane stall resulting from
ice around the very time operators, with FAA approval, were starting to
introduce this seldom met phenomenon into their training curricula.

Following
some prominent regional crashes in the mid-‘90s, Congress passed the infamous
Pilot Record Improvement Act of 1996. Rather than look at training or working
conditions, airlines were going to be made safer by tracking bad pilots and
screening them out. Improvements wouldn’t be made to training, only the
keeping and sharing of records. Under the law, before a pilot can be employed
by another carrier, his current and previous employers must release all
training and disciplinary records. The pilot is supposed to be offered the
opportunity to dispute anything negative but releases his company from liability
for any inaccuracies transmitted through paperwork reflecting judgements made
through very subjective criteria. Not only does such a policy prevent a pilot
from quietly seeking employment elsewhere, but it hampers whistle blowing and
has been documented as a pilot retention technique at regionals like Trans
States, where failure rates were up to 80 percent are used to show the FAA
they had really high standards. Even more absurd, the law doesn’t require the
airline doing the hiring to even consider what’s in the information packet
when it arrives, and applicants from the military are exempt.

Regional
airline industry growth came about as a result of circumventing expensive
labor contracts at the mainlines, but now they are exerting a downward
pressure there to the point where Sullenberger’s retirement depends upon
re-telling his story for an income. Is it practical for every pilot to ditch
a jet at the end of his career in lieu of a pension? This story will get old
really fast.

Flying
on Regional Airlines is inescapable domestically unless passengers restrict
themselves to Southwest Airlines. With Sullenberger and Schiff advising
against becoming pilots for even major airlines, how do the regionals expect
to fill their cockpits now that the carrot of eventual employment with a
major airline is less attractive and more elusive with airlines shifting more
of their flying over to regionals?

After
decades of telling pilots that the next hiring boom is around the corner and
subscribing them to glossy career magazines with interview prep questions,
statistics to compare themselves to, resume writing services, featured
airline of the month articles, etc, the premier counseling service AIR, Inc.
closed its doors on 2/13/2009 with the
words: “It has been an honor and a privilege to serve you during the past
20 years. However, the current status of the airline industry and the economy
has made our business unsustainable, and we are closing.”Prospective pilots just aren’t going to get this kind of pep
talk from their guidance counselors.

The
prospect of a job with a major airline has motivated many regional pilots to
keep their records clean by flying safely, but now as despair sets in we’re
seeing the effects of low wages.

Flying
has been described as hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror
and that is why complacency is the biggest killer.

When
Comair flight 191 lined up with the wrong runway at 7am in Lexington,
Kentucky the crew made a fatal error that costs the lives of all but the
first officer by over running a runway that was too short to their plane to
become airborne. Their complacency was fed according to the NTSB by:

a failure to use
available cues and aids to identify the airplane's location on the airport
surface during taxi and their failure to cross-check and verify that the
airplane was on the correct runway before takeoff. Contributing to the
accident were the flight crew's nonpertinent conversations during taxi, which
resulted in a loss of positional awareness and the Federal Aviation
Administration's failure to require that all runway crossings be authorized
only by specific air traffic control clearances.

The
first officer apparently grew impatient waiting for a major airliner to recruit
him and took this job after working at Gulfstream International.

Pinnacle
Flight 3701 was a repositioning ferry flight with no passengers that turned
into a deadly joy ride to exploit the capabilities of an empty regional jet. On
the way up to the CRJ-200’s maximum altitude, the crew ignored several
warnings and induced a flameout of both engines. From 41,000 feet their time
in the glide seems like an eternity next to Sullenberger’s but fear of
reprisal kept them from declaring an emergency. A prompt declaration would
have given them preferential handling by ATC and several viable options.
Instead, as their boredom turned to terror, and they tried cover up their
recklessness with more deviations from standard operating procedures. In the
end, they overflew four diversionary airports and crashed and burned two
miles short of the fifth behind a row of houses in the dark. Both pilots had
worked for Gulfstream International and had presumably given up hope of
working for a major airline.

Prior
to the crash of the aforementioned Colgan 3407, the crew had been chattering
about their appalling working conditions. The captain was a demoralized
former pilot at Gulfstream International.

After
the decline of the entire profession which resulted from the shift to
regional airlines, we now find ourselves in a mess with no way out. The
bottom has yet to be reached.

Last
year, Gulfstream International was fined $1.3 million for falsifying crew
member flight times. The very airline that has employees paying to work for them can’t seem to exploit then enough, and
now has pilots flying beyond FAA limits. That fine, added to one incurred for
the ignominious distinction of being caught using car parts on their planes,
has forced the company into bankruptcy, and yet they continue to fly.

Jobs
at the majors are too few and increasingly too unattractive to
entice pilots to work for food stamp wages at the regionals which now
make up the backbone of the domestic airline system. Nobody but a fool would
invest the time and money necessary to become an airline pilot with these
limited prospects. Some will continue to fly and slowly pay down debt or
because, while Burger King may pay better, leaving aviation even temporarily
could make all their efforts for naught. Along with flight time, employers
want to see currency and recency of experience. They want to hire pilots who
are working as pilots and pilots not flying find it difficult and expensive
to get themselves re-qualified.

It’s
doubtful that the airlines will be able to fall back on the supply of social
engineered military pilots soon to arrive with new tolerances. Last year, the
Air Force trained more pilots to fly UAVs than fixed wing aircraft. Until the
fantasy of unmanned airliners comes to fruition, these pilots are best
advised to stay in the service because for now only the electronics
department of Best Buy or the local hobby shop will appreciate their skills
with radio controlled aircraft. The stagnation and low pay at the majors offer
little enticement for entering civilian aviation and the demands of regional
aviation with its compressed training schedules can be a rude awakening. When
the parent company of American Airlines and American Eagle (AMR) got the
Eagle pilots to sign an 18 year contract it did so not by offering better
working conditions at Eagle but rather offering the carrot of a potential
“flow through” of its senior pilots to American. The unanticipated events of
9/11 brought, instead, a “flow back” of junior American Airlines pilots, like
Brian Schiff, to American Eagle. Flowing back as well were some American
Airlines new hires with very little civilian time who found it difficult to
get through training.

The
saddest thing about this story is that we didn’t need to go down this path.
As mentioned before, Southwest Airlines does not use regionals. All
passengers with Southwest tickets fly on Southwest even on short routes,
something which demonstrates that the term “regional” as applied to aviation
is probably a misnomer. Southwest is a product of the deregulation
environment to be sure, and it’s never been a glamorous affair for passengers
who are loaded as if into the back of a cattle car. Yet, while they provide
very competitive airfares to the consumers with the most productive employees
in the industry, its crews are among the most unionized and best compensated,
and Southwest has never had an unprofitable quarter.

None
of this was an accident. Southwest’s founder Herb Kelleher invested a lot of
time and money into creating a culture employees were proud to be a part of.
This is reflected in its NYSE abbreviation: LUV and by the renaming of its
Human Resources Department to “People Department.” If anyone doubts
Southwest’s commitment to a business philosophy at odds with the mindset of a
Harvard MBA graduate, pick up a copy of Nuts!
Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success and
read, if nothing else, chapter headings like: Hire for Attitudes and Train
for Skills, Act Like an Owner, One Great Big Family, and Customers Come
Second.

Kelleher’s
belief was that if an airline treats its employees right, the employees will
in turn treat the travelers right. It is a radical concept but one that has
given birth to an enviable Esprit de Corps which shows no sign of waning.

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